It’s pretty common knowledge now that Adobe has started an initiative to provide automated flash indexing for the major search engines. (Google describes its involvement here). As exciting as the idea is, the consensus in the SEO community is that the ability to truly index Flash content isn’t here yet, and won’t be for a while.

These articles have great practical reasons (i.e., low rank results) for why Flash is bad for SEO. But what’s the big deal? All the content is now transparent; why can’t crawlers work through a Flash animation the same way a person does, identifying content and making it relevant?

The short answer is that search engine bots are pathfinders, and Flash movies don’t have good paths for them to follow or find. Pathfinding is the act of mapping out a defined space where a bunch of pages are linked to each other. Although there are some mathematical challenges to doing this efficiently, it doesn’t take a particularly smart agent to find all the paths on a website and how they interlink.

The structure of static websites lends itself to this approach. But Flash can, literally, create anything, from a website simulation to a computer game. Generally what flash developers do is something in between. How does a crawler know how to deal with a button that creates an “event”, such as the introduction of a sound, or perhaps a content snippet, in the scope of its hope to find paths across a network of pages?

It probably can’t. Maybe someday the crawlers will be smart enough to know that an event they “crawl” is really the jump button on a computer game, but in the meantime such information will just confuse and muddle things. Superficial attempts to address this issue–largely by providing “alternative” content to crawlers that mimic the content of a flash site–result in lower values by Google’s crawlers and create serious maintenance headaches, in the same way that managing multi-lingual sites doubles web team workloads.

So what do you tell your developers, who rightly love Flash for its versatility, portability, and relatively low programming effort? Three things:

• If you must use flash, use it to tell a visual story, not a content one, such as this animation on Saline Lectronics to crate high-impact events without affecting copy.
• Whatever you do, don’t use flash as the framework tool to build the site, and avoid embedding content in it. Use .css instead.
• Build your site with a pathfinder philosophy. A good site is a series of related ideas connected by paths, each one of which should be a road to some related or similar level of understanding.

Think about your site this way, and your visitors will reward you. The crawlers will too!